IN THE SOUTH SEAS
PART 1: THE MARQUESAS
CHAPTER I--AN ISLAND LANDFALL
For nearly ten years my health had been declining; and for some
while before I set forth upon my voyage, I believed I was come to
the afterpiece of life, and had only the nurse and undertaker to
expect. It was suggested that I should try the South Seas; and I
was not unwilling to visit like a ghost, and be carried like a
bale, among scenes that had attracted me in youth and health. I
chartered accordingly Dr. Merrit's schooner yacht, the Casco,
seventy-four tons register; sailed from San Francisco towards the
end of June 1888, visited the eastern islands, and was left early
the next year at Honolulu. Hence, lacking courage to return to my
old life of the house and sick-room, I set forth to leeward in a
trading schooner, the Equator, of a little over seventy tons, spent
four months among the atolls (low coral islands) of the Gilbert
group, and reached Samoa towards the close of '89. By that time
gratitude and habit were beginning to attach me to the islands; I
had gained a competency of strength; I had made friends; I had
learned new interests; the time of my voyages had passed like days
in fairyland; and I decided to remain. I began to prepare these
pages at sea, on a third cruise, in the trading steamer Janet
Nicoll. If more days are granted me, they shall be passed where I
have found life most pleasant and man most interesting; the axes of
my black boys are already clearing the foundations of my future
house; and I must learn to address readers from the uttermost parts
of the sea.
That I should thus have reversed the verdict of Lord Tennyson's
hero is less eccentric than appears. Few men who come to the
islands leave them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm
shades and the trade-wind fans them till they die, perhaps
cherishing to the last the fancy of a visit home, which is rarely
made, more rarely enjoyed, and yet more rarely repeated. No part
of the world exerts the same attractive power upon the visitor, and
the task before me is to communicate to fireside travellers some
sense of its seduction, and to describe the life, at sea and
ashore, of many hundred thousand persons, some of our own blood and
language, all our contemporaries, and yet as remote in thought and
habit as Rob Roy or Barbarossa, the Apostles or the Caesars.
The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the
first sunrise, the first South Sea island, are memories apart and
touched a virginity of sense. On the 28th of July 1888 the moon
was an hour down by four in the morning. In the east a radiating
centre of brightness told of the day; and beneath, on the skyline,
the morning bank was already building, black as ink. We have all
read of the swiftness of the day's coming and departure in low
latitudes; it is a point on which the scientific and sentimental
tourist are at one, and has inspired some tasteful poetry. The
period certainly varies with the season; but here is one case
exactly noted. Although the dawn was thus preparing by four, the
sun was not up till six; and it was half-past five before we could
distinguish our expected islands from the clouds on the horizon.
Eight degrees south, and the day two hours a-coming. The interval
was passed on deck in the silence of expectation, the customary
thrill of landfall heightened by the strangeness of the shores that
we were then approaching. Slowly they took shape in the
attenuating darkness. Ua-huna, piling up to a truncated summit,
appeared the first upon the starboard bow; almost abeam arose our
destination, Nuka-hiva, whelmed in cloud; and betwixt and to the
southward, the first rays of the sun displayed the needles of Ua-
pu. These pricked about the line of the horizon; like the
pinnacles of some ornate and monstrous church, they stood there, in
the sparkling brightness of the morning, the fit signboard of a
world of wonders.
Not one soul aboard the Casco had set foot upon the islands, or
knew, except by accident, one word of any of the island tongues;
and it was with something perhaps of the same anxious pleasure as
thrilled the bosom of discoverers that we drew near these
problematic shores. The land heaved up in peaks and rising vales;
it fell in cliffs and buttresses; its colour ran through fifty
modulations in a scale of pearl and rose and olive; and it was
crowned above by opalescent clouds. The suffusion of vague hues
deceived the eye; the shadows of clouds were confounded with the
articulations of the mountains; and the isle and its unsubstantial
canopy rose and shimmered before us like a single mass. There was
no beacon, no smoke of towns to be expected, no plying pilot.
Somewhere, in that pale phantasmagoria of cliff and cloud, our
haven lay concealed; and somewhere to the east of it--the only sea-
mark given--a certain headland, known indifferently as Cape Adam
and Eve, or Cape Jack and Jane, and distinguished by two colossal
figures, the gross statuary of nature. These we were to find; for
these we craned and stared, focused glasses, and wrangled over
charts; and the sun was overhead and the land close ahead before we
found them. To a ship approaching, like the Casco, from the north,
they proved indeed the least conspicuous features of a striking
coast; the surf flying high above its base; strange, austere, and
feathered mountains rising behind; and Jack and Jane, or Adam and
Eve, impending like a pair of warts above the breakers.
Thence we bore away along shore. On our port beam we might hear
the explosions of the surf; a few birds flew fishing under the
prow; there was no other sound or mark of life, whether of man or
beast, in all that quarter of the island. Winged by her own
impetus and the dying breeze, the Casco skimmed under cliffs,
opened out a cove, showed us a beach and some green trees, and
flitted by again, bowing to the swell. The trees, from our
distance, might have been hazel; the beach might have been in
Europe; the mountain forms behind modelled in little from the Alps,
and the forest which clustered on their ramparts a growth no more
considerable than our Scottish heath. Again the cliff yawned, but
now with a deeper entry; and the Casco, hauling her wind, began to
slide into the bay of Anaho. The cocoa-palm, that giraffe of
vegetables, so graceful, so ungainly, to the European eye so
foreign, was to be seen crowding on the beach, and climbing and
fringing the steep sides of mountains. Rude and bare hills
embraced the inlet upon either hand; it was enclosed to the
landward by a bulk of shattered mountains. In every crevice of
that barrier the forest harboured, roosting and nestling there like
birds about a ruin; and far above, it greened and roughened the
razor edges of the summit.
Under the eastern shore, our schooner, now bereft of any breeze,
continued to creep in: the smart creature, when once under way,
appearing motive in herself. From close aboard arose the bleating
of young lambs; a bird sang in the hillside; the scent of the land
and of a hundred fruits or flowers flowed forth to meet us; and,
presently, a house or two appeared, standing high upon the ankles
of the hills, and one of these surrounded with what seemed a
garden. These conspicuous habitations, that patch of culture, had
we but known it, were a mark of the passage of whites; and we might
have approached a hundred islands and not found their parallel. It
was longer ere we spied the native village, standing (in the
universal fashion) close upon a curve of beach, close under a grove
of palms; the sea in front growling and whitening on a concave arc
of reef. For the cocoa-tree and the island man are both lovers and
neighbours of the surf. 'The coral waxes, the palm grows, but man
departs,' says the sad Tahitian proverb; but they are all three, so
long as they endure, co-haunters of the beach. The mark of
anchorage was a blow-hole in the rocks, near the south-easterly
corner of the bay. Punctually to our use, the blow-hole spouted;
the schooner turned upon her heel; the anchor plunged. It was a
small sound, a great event; my soul went down with these moorings
whence no windlass may extract nor any diver fish it up; and I, and
some part of my ship's company, were from that hour the bondslaves
of the isles of Vivien.
Before yet the anchor plunged a canoe was already paddling from the
hamlet. It contained two men: one white, one brown and tattooed
across the face with bands of blue, both in immaculate white
European clothes: the resident trader, Mr. Regler, and the native
chief, Taipi-Kikino. 'Captain, is it permitted to come on board?'
were the first words we heard among the islands. Canoe followed
canoe till the ship swarmed with stalwart, six-foot men in every
stage of undress; some in a shirt, some in a loin-cloth, one in a
handkerchief imperfectly adjusted; some, and these the more
considerable, tattooed from head to foot in awful patterns; some
barbarous and knived; one, who sticks in my memory as something
bestial, squatting on his hams in a canoe, sucking an orange and
spitting it out again to alternate sides with ape-like vivacity--
all talking, and we could not understand one word; all trying to
trade with us who had no thought of trading, or offering us island
curios at prices palpably absurd. There was no word of welcome; no
show of civility; no hand extended save that of the chief and Mr.
Regler. As we still continued to refuse the proffered articles,
complaint ran high and rude; and one, the jester of the party,
railed upon our meanness amid jeering laughter. Amongst other
angry pleasantries--'Here is a mighty fine ship,' said he, 'to have
no money on board!' I own I was inspired with sensible repugnance;
even with alarm. The ship was manifestly in their power; we had
women on board; I knew nothing of my guests beyond the fact that
they were cannibals; the Directory (my only guide) was full of
timid cautions; and as for the trader, whose presence might else
have reassured me, were not whites in the Pacific the usual
instigators and accomplices of native outrage? When he reads this
confession, our kind friend, Mr. Regler, can afford to smile.
Later in the day, as I sat writing up my journal, the cabin was
filled from end to end with Marquesans: three brown-skinned
generations, squatted cross-legged upon the floor, and regarding me
in silence with embarrassing eyes. The eyes of all Polynesians are
large, luminous, and melting; they are like the eyes of animals and
some Italians. A kind of despair came over me, to sit there
helpless under all these staring orbs, and be thus blocked in a
corner of my cabin by this speechless crowd: and a kind of rage to
think they were beyond the reach of articulate communication, like
furred animals, or folk born deaf, or the dwellers of some alien
planet.
To cross the Channel is, for a boy of twelve, to change heavens; to
cross the Atlantic, for a man of twenty-four, is hardly to modify
his diet. But I was now escaped out of the shadow of the Roman
empire, under whose toppling monuments we were all cradled, whose
laws and letters are on every hand of us, constraining and
preventing. I was now to see what men might be whose fathers had
never studied Virgil, had never been conquered by Caesar, and never
been ruled by the wisdom of Gaius or Papinian. By the same step I
had journeyed forth out of that comfortable zone of kindred
languages, where the curse of Babel is so easy to be remedied; and
my new fellow-creatures sat before me dumb like images. Methought,
in my travels, all human relation was to be excluded; and when I
returned home (for in those days I still projected my return) I
should have but dipped into a picture-book without a text. Nay,
and I even questioned if my travels should be much prolonged;
perhaps they were destined to a speedy end; perhaps my subsequent
friend, Kauanui, whom I remarked there, sitting silent with the
rest, for a man of some authority, might leap from his hams with an
ear-splitting signal, the ship be carried at a rush, and the ship's
company butchered for the table.
There could be nothing more natural than these apprehensions, nor
anything more groundless. In my experience of the islands, I had
never again so menacing a reception; were I to meet with such to-
day, I should be more alarmed and tenfold more surprised. The
majority of Polynesians are easy folk to get in touch with, frank,
fond of notice, greedy of the least affection, like amiable,
fawning dogs; and even with the Marquesans, so recently and so
imperfectly redeemed from a blood-boltered barbarism, all were to
become our intimates, and one, at least, was to mourn sincerely our
departure.
